A Found Peace
by bayumlikedayum
Summary: She nearly cries the first time she sees him again, his face somber but calm and open, the soft blue light of his spectral body radiating around her small quarters. Ben/Rey. Spoilers for Rise of Skywalker.


**A/N: **I wrote this to help myself process Rise of Skywalker (which, I'm sure, is also why you're here reading this, so welcome!) I'm going off the premise that Obi-Wan was able to regularly commune with Qui-Gon starting at the end of Revenge of the Sith, so others would be able to do the same, and Luke was materially real enough to catch his lightsaber at the end of Rise. Anyway, I hope this helps a little and I hope you enjoy!

**A Found Peace**

She nearly cries the first time she sees him again, his face somber but calm and open, the soft blue light of his spectral body radiating around her small quarters. It's only been a couple weeks since he died, since he saved her, but the quiet has stretched long and lonely and the longer it's gone, the more she's wondered if he's still there. She's seen Master Skywalker's Force ghost, the essence of him reborn, but her contact with the other side has been minimal at best and she can't feel Ben anymore, so she doesn't know—

But there he is and his eyes are soft like his aura.

"Rey," he says, and then she's on her feet, running to him despite the close quarters they're already in.

She doesn't know what she's expecting, but she's surprised when she reaches him, runs into him, and he's there and stumbles with the force of her. And when she wraps her arms around him, he's real and solid and he smells like himself, warm and spice and wood.

She wants nothing more than to hold him for impossibly long moments, but when she finally reaches up, tilting up towards him, and winds her fingers through his long, dark, soft hair as she's inexplicably wanted to do since the moment he whipped off his helmet in that interrogation cell and revealed not the face of a monster but the face of a man, he's still real then too. He's still real when she kisses him, long and dark and soft just like everything else about him, and he's still real when his mouth moves against hers in return, stoking something foreign in her, causing her to grasp at his broad shoulders as his hands settle at her waist.

She doesn't want to question it. She's afraid if she does, it'll reveal itself as a dream, a reality not meant for her to experience, and this vision will whisk itself away, relegated only to her imagination.

But he's solid and there and still real, so she dares herself to ask anyway.

"How can I feel you?"

He only shakes his head before kissing her again and she realizes he doesn't know either. And as his arms come around her and he pulls her against him more fully, she decides she doesn't care.

**...**

The first few times she sees him, she's desperate, clinging to the moments they have together because of the uncertainty that they'll have any more. But with more visits comes a trust and faith he'll return to see her again, that the Force will allow him to do so as it has done before.

She comes to understand that death isn't death, but rather a step into something else, and that for better or worse, he's found a bridge between just for her.

…

She doesn't see him every day or close to it. Sometimes his absences stretch long, longer than she'd like, but every moment she needs him, he's there.

Sometimes she has nightmares that she's back in front of that dark and twisted throne, that the legions of the faithful are watching behind her once more, and that this time the tide doesn't turn. She's successful in waking herself up most of the time, gasping and sweating and sometimes with a scream in her throat, but he's always there regardless, quietly soothing. She comes to feel the blue of his aura as a warmth, a body heat emanating from him and into her.

She also finds there are moments before he leaves where she can't feel him anymore. He goes — she doesn't know how to explain it other than to say that he becomes materially thin, inconstant, a vapor rather than a solid.

She always feels empty when he leaves, but the feeling always passes with the knowledge that he'll return. Maybe not soon, and never as soon as she'd like, but sometime.

**...**

She knows his mother is there too, that Luke is there, that she'll also join him there someday. She asks him one day about his reunion with his parents and he takes a long pause before he tells her that he'd been worried for so long — worried isn't even the right word, he knows, but he doesn't know another — that he was too far gone to ever come back, that he'd gone too far into the darkness to ever return. And now, being as he is, he understands with a quiet peace the foolishness of those thoughts, the strength of his mother's love for him, the acceptance he's now found despite his lacking.

She's happy for him, knowing that even though she can't have him as much as she wants, she has him as much as she needs and that he's found his calm. And in turn, a still certainty arises as he continues to come back for her — that this will continue until the day she dies and passes on to find him, that she needs nothing else, and that there is much she has left to do.


End file.
